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The Importance of the RIGHT Cover

Okay. So. I've been taking on a lot of clients and doing a lot of marketing research. One of the things we've been focusing a lot on is covers and where they fall with the top performers.

There are many clients who come to me with amazing pre-mades that just don't fit the niche they're looking for, or worse, customs they've commissioned that don't fit. Now, sometimes, it's that the artist didn't know how to hit the niche, and other times it's because the author was micro-managing the artist. But in either case, the cover doesn't match the top-selling notch of the niche they're aiming for.

So, what do you need to do in order to know if your book cover fits?

Compare, compare, compare.

The first thing you want to always do is to look at the top performers in your proposed niche and look at their covers. Look at the indies. Don't compare your books to traditionally published or Amazon published because they don't have to follow the same rules you will have to.

Then, copy those covers into a comparison document.

I had to do this analysis for Whiskey Witches. We were struggling to find models with enough poses and facial expression that we liked that didn't cost and arm, a leg, and half a first-born child. We were concidering remaking all the covers, but needed an approach. We knew we were in UF, so we needed "glowy stuff" and we knew roughly what colors we needed, though that was changing as we made the covers.

However, we took a look at the covers we needed to compete against, and these were the ones we found:

These are all amazing covers! Now, the Whiskey Witches covers we had were a step up from where they were, but were still a step behind where they needed to be. And they were hindering our saleability.

Those were using things we'd learned that were...I don't know. A year old? Maybe not even that. But we're constantly learning--we have to be in order to survive--and this is what we came up with after studying the market more.

These are a lot closer and it shows in the sales. Ads have take off and so have the sales! And the only thing we did was update the covers!